Of course. AMD used to directly rip the entire processor from Intel and then make it just a little better. Notables are the 40Mhz 386 chip and the AMD DX4's. Much nicer then the Intel parts.
Of course, once Intel went on with the Pentiums, AMD no longer had the license to copy Intel, and it wouldn't be until years later when they would finally be able to catch up and even out-perform Intel once again, this time on it's own merits.
If it wasn't for the court ruling that AMD could copy the 386/486 processor, they probably would not exist today and we'd still be using 600Mhz processors.
When I first overclocked my Packard Bell 486sx-20 to 33Mhz, I had no idea you could do it. I was just messing around with it. I didn't have a name for it.
I used to go to the local computer shows and tell all the vendors "Hey, you can run that 25Mhz chip at 33 if you just set the jumper." Nobody believed me.
Years later, when the internet started going and all the "pc review" web sites appeared, it became all the rage and they called it overclocking. Woo.
How is this a generational thing when both you and your dad told a story about RAM? Wouldn't it make more sense here if it was your dad talking about the car engine and you and a friend talking about the RAM?
I don't think it's generational at all. Some people are into cars, even still. Others are into Computers. Some are into airplanes. Others like golf. It's just what you like to do.
Okay, I hate responding to AC's, but I'm feeling crazy..
Where's your proof? If you think I'm an idiot for saying "50% seems high" then you're even more of an idiot for saying it's "easily over 50%" when you have no proof, no numbers.. show me the proof!
50%+ would be epidemic. I'm sorry, but it's just not that bad. Between myself and all my friends that use e-bay, perhaps it's not $500,000 but it's over $80,000 between incoming and outgoing items. No, not all of them have been over $500 but many have been. Hey, I work in IT. I can afford it.
And we've never had a problem. If the problem was "easily over 50%" then one of us should have had a problem right? Or we got REEAAALLLLYYY lucky? Don't think so.
If you've noticed, but probably haven't because you're a moron, most of the 'fraud' claims come from people that tried to perform off-eBay side deals, or didn't read the fine print, or any number of easily avoidable things. Again, I don't think that this is right, but I also believe that people should be a little more savy because they're allowing themselves to be cheated.
I can usually find pretty much the same web sites no matter what search page I use. But I use Google because when I go to www.google.com there's one image, three lines of text total and a couple links. The page loads fast.
I don't need to see the news, weather, articles, flash animations, the time and date, the world affairs, the best deals on travel, and everything else you can imagine all the the front page. If I need those things I will use google to search for them.
Google will remain #1 until they change their front page to be full of bullshit like MSN, Yahoo, etc.
Too bad the seller can simply remove your bids whenever they want... so much for that idea.
50% is terribly high for your numbers man. I've purchased and sold hundreds of items and never had a problem. Sure, sometimes the sellers can take their sweet ass time shipping something, but I've never been frauded. Neither have any of my friends.
A lot of the so-called fraud auctions actually tell you when you're going to get if you win the item, and if you don't bother to read the description I'm not going to feel terribly sorry for you. Sure, these assholes selling the stuff should be stopped but people NEED to take a little responsibility and stop being so nieve.
Well, that's good news. It's been my experience that although companies may spend ten or twenty large on a server, they often won't opt for the extra $30 for a DVD drive when there's no immediate need.
If they come standard, however, then that's a Good Thing.
Personally I just can't believe that DVD drives aren't absolute standard these days. I guess it's because there's so many CDR drives and not so many DVDR drives. Sure, a DVD reader will read both but the majority of people only read CD's... same old problem of migrating to any new tech.
Well, you know, I agree with you. I know a lot of people hate the idea of closed-source video drivers but it's better then nothing. nVidia and ATI both have linux drivers out and if you're going to be playing games it's going to be on one of those chipsets.
I have found the nVidia drivers to be fast, although a little quirky at times. I've never had them crash or anything. Sure, if it was OSS then someone *could* fix them, but there's a whole lot of other quirky OSS on most linux boxes that it sometimes doesn't seem like this is always the reality of the beast.
I for one, and happy to see driver support at all. I'd prefer them to be fully GPL but hey, as long as the OS itself is GPL then I think things are looking up.
Let's face it, it's going to take a long time before everything is GPL. Give it time.
Even if we saw this tech to our houses, the ISP's would still nerf the connection at some lame ass speed like 768k/128k. I mean, cablemodems are capable of 40Mbit and they usually nerf it down to 1.5 Mbit/256Kbit. And no, most nodes are not saturated; before they capped my cablemodem (which was after three years of using it) I used to see 10Mbit on a regular basis, and easily T-1 speeds on the upstream. I live in a heavily populated area.
Yea, but the xbox tries to render at 60 full fps anyways. Most games will run 480p if you use the HD kit and they don't run any different. They look a bunch better though.
I loved the Jornada. I don't follow the mobile market much, but I did notice that I didn't see them much lately. It's a shame they stopped making these.
They were little mini-pc's that could do a lot of real work. The keyboards were tiny but qwerty so you could still bang something out quick.
Fantastic device for remote management of servers or anything else.
Oh well. I'll tell you one thing though, I'll never buy one of those PDA's that you have to use something like Palm's grafitti or some on-screen keyboard to use. I'd rather have something slightly bigger and be able to use it well.
It's a little tiny web site, with one picture (and a note that he almost didn't want to show it because it would show his "secrets") and a few videos that are supposedly taken from this robot's head cameras.
Yea okay.
I think that if this were legit, there would be more then a little cheezy web page and no other documentation. If the guy really wanted to service the public with his "traffic" bot then he wouldn't be so secretive about it anyways..
It's quite probable that these render farms contain no local storage at all; they don't really need it. I guess it would depend on a lot of variables.
For IDE vs SCSI, it really depends. Some of the higher end IDE stuff has longer warranties and faster rotation speeds. They are meant for mid-market server type applications. Depending on the situation, IDE can certainly offer great advantages over SCSI in the terms of cost. There's some really nice IDE raid controllers, and with 300GB IDE disks you can slap together some really huge storage volumes. It might not be as high of performance as SCSI, but it can come close and it's 1/10th the price.
Your experience may vary, but for me, IDE disks appear to be manufactured with similar QC as SCSI disks. I haven't noticed any differences in failue rates, but you're certainly right in that most desktop-class IDE disks only come with a single year warranty these days, so this could become a factor when deciding on which technology to use.
I would imagine, however, any firm that goes and purchases boxes in the thousands would also purchase extended warranty agreements. It's a part of any mid to large data center cost. Usually, you go with one brand, and stick to it, and purchase blanket warranties every year based on approximately how many machines you got running.
I suppose any large scale system would have redundancy. If a handful of nodes drop out, the system should be able to cope with this seamlessly. Same would go for things like hard drives; I'd hope that if the data on the individual units' drives need to be preserved, RAIDs would come into play.
For sure though, you definately want to budget repairs. They play a fairly big part of any data center setting; if you got six thousand boxes it must be huge.
ps. I've never found SCSI disks to be any more reliable, unfortunately... just a hell of a lot more expensive, and a bit quicker. And of course, more versatile =)
Although I do not disagree with you; power concerns *could* be an advantage if you say, move from 6,000 servers to 4,000. It could help offset the cost of the hardware and personnel resources a bit.
You seemed to make it out to be the holy grail of using more powerful boxes. If you did not mean this, I apologize.
One comment however, about "not having to worry about parts that most often fail after a year" I'm assuming you mean PC vs. Mac? This is an unfair comparison, and most of the hardware in the two systems end up coming from the same plants anyways.
I'm sure Sega ordered 7.6Mhz chips, and got chips guarenteed to run at 7.6Mhz. If they are overclockable, that's great but if 1,000 of them are bad, Motorola won't do much to help you out. In fact, they'd probably sue you.
I seriously doubt that power consumption is in the minds of anyone over at Pixar. Compared to the costs of administration, personell, and the hardware itself, power isn't even close to the top of the list.
Pixar will use whatever systems they need to make production time resonable. If that means an extra few thousand bucks a month because of the extra 30 servers, who cares.. drop in the bucket.
There's other (more rational) reasons for reducing the number of servers, and the lower electric bill is simply a bonus.
Since when do Americans educate themselves about purchases ever? =)
I guess some people ask me what they should buy, and I usually just don't give a shit enough to try to get them to use something other then Windows. If I do, I'll become tech support for them and I already get enough of that junk from work.
There were certian softwares out that that helped circumvent floppy protection, like CloneCD does for CD's. But it didn't always work.
Back when I used my Commodore 64 full time, some of the disks themselves were physically altered (a hole in the disk here, a notch there, etc) so 100% duplication was often impossible.
Of course, the crackers were able to work around this stuff pretty easily.
Slashdot Mirror
If you followed the context, you may have also come to the conclution that I meant "small sites with dumb admins."
Yea, it's true. People keep trying to say "But you still want those cheap computers and cheap software!!"
It doesn't add up - when a company oursources they never lower prices they just make more profits. GO USA...
I've heard rumors of sites rejecting non-IE browsers, but I have yet to find one myself.
Probably only some small sites with admins that don't have a clue. I avoid such sites anyways.
Of course. AMD used to directly rip the entire processor from Intel and then make it just a little better. Notables are the 40Mhz 386 chip and the AMD DX4's. Much nicer then the Intel parts.
Of course, once Intel went on with the Pentiums, AMD no longer had the license to copy Intel, and it wouldn't be until years later when they would finally be able to catch up and even out-perform Intel once again, this time on it's own merits.
If it wasn't for the court ruling that AMD could copy the 386/486 processor, they probably would not exist today and we'd still be using 600Mhz processors.
When I first overclocked my Packard Bell 486sx-20 to 33Mhz, I had no idea you could do it. I was just messing around with it. I didn't have a name for it.
I used to go to the local computer shows and tell all the vendors "Hey, you can run that 25Mhz chip at 33 if you just set the jumper." Nobody believed me.
Years later, when the internet started going and all the "pc review" web sites appeared, it became all the rage and they called it overclocking. Woo.
How is this a generational thing when both you and your dad told a story about RAM? Wouldn't it make more sense here if it was your dad talking about the car engine and you and a friend talking about the RAM?
I don't think it's generational at all. Some people are into cars, even still. Others are into Computers. Some are into airplanes. Others like golf. It's just what you like to do.
Okay, I hate responding to AC's, but I'm feeling crazy..
Where's your proof? If you think I'm an idiot for saying "50% seems high" then you're even more of an idiot for saying it's "easily over 50%" when you have no proof, no numbers.. show me the proof!
50%+ would be epidemic. I'm sorry, but it's just not that bad. Between myself and all my friends that use e-bay, perhaps it's not $500,000 but it's over $80,000 between incoming and outgoing items. No, not all of them have been over $500 but many have been. Hey, I work in IT. I can afford it.
And we've never had a problem. If the problem was "easily over 50%" then one of us should have had a problem right? Or we got REEAAALLLLYYY lucky? Don't think so.
If you've noticed, but probably haven't because you're a moron, most of the 'fraud' claims come from people that tried to perform off-eBay side deals, or didn't read the fine print, or any number of easily avoidable things. Again, I don't think that this is right, but I also believe that people should be a little more savy because they're allowing themselves to be cheated.
I can usually find pretty much the same web sites no matter what search page I use. But I use Google because when I go to www.google.com there's one image, three lines of text total and a couple links. The page loads fast.
I don't need to see the news, weather, articles, flash animations, the time and date, the world affairs, the best deals on travel, and everything else you can imagine all the the front page. If I need those things I will use google to search for them.
Google will remain #1 until they change their front page to be full of bullshit like MSN, Yahoo, etc.
Too bad the seller can simply remove your bids whenever they want... so much for that idea.
50% is terribly high for your numbers man. I've purchased and sold hundreds of items and never had a problem. Sure, sometimes the sellers can take their sweet ass time shipping something, but I've never been frauded. Neither have any of my friends.
A lot of the so-called fraud auctions actually tell you when you're going to get if you win the item, and if you don't bother to read the description I'm not going to feel terribly sorry for you. Sure, these assholes selling the stuff should be stopped but people NEED to take a little responsibility and stop being so nieve.
Well, that's good news. It's been my experience that although companies may spend ten or twenty large on a server, they often won't opt for the extra $30 for a DVD drive when there's no immediate need.
If they come standard, however, then that's a Good Thing.
Personally I just can't believe that DVD drives aren't absolute standard these days. I guess it's because there's so many CDR drives and not so many DVDR drives. Sure, a DVD reader will read both but the majority of people only read CD's... same old problem of migrating to any new tech.
I'd say "make both."
A lot (most?) server boxes don't have DVD drives either.
Well, you know, I agree with you. I know a lot of people hate the idea of closed-source video drivers but it's better then nothing. nVidia and ATI both have linux drivers out and if you're going to be playing games it's going to be on one of those chipsets.
I have found the nVidia drivers to be fast, although a little quirky at times. I've never had them crash or anything. Sure, if it was OSS then someone *could* fix them, but there's a whole lot of other quirky OSS on most linux boxes that it sometimes doesn't seem like this is always the reality of the beast.
I for one, and happy to see driver support at all. I'd prefer them to be fully GPL but hey, as long as the OS itself is GPL then I think things are looking up.
Let's face it, it's going to take a long time before everything is GPL. Give it time.
Even if we saw this tech to our houses, the ISP's would still nerf the connection at some lame ass speed like 768k/128k. I mean, cablemodems are capable of 40Mbit and they usually nerf it down to 1.5 Mbit/256Kbit. And no, most nodes are not saturated; before they capped my cablemodem (which was after three years of using it) I used to see 10Mbit on a regular basis, and easily T-1 speeds on the upstream. I live in a heavily populated area.
I thought these chips were supposed to have "good" performance while consuming a lot less power.
Yea, but the xbox tries to render at 60 full fps anyways. Most games will run 480p if you use the HD kit and they don't run any different. They look a bunch better though.
And, the hardware is optimized to work with each other more closely then a normal PC.
AND, you run your xbox at 640x480 for the most part since this is what your average TV will display.
I loved the Jornada. I don't follow the mobile market much, but I did notice that I didn't see them much lately. It's a shame they stopped making these.
They were little mini-pc's that could do a lot of real work. The keyboards were tiny but qwerty so you could still bang something out quick.
Fantastic device for remote management of servers or anything else.
Oh well. I'll tell you one thing though, I'll never buy one of those PDA's that you have to use something like Palm's grafitti or some on-screen keyboard to use. I'd rather have something slightly bigger and be able to use it well.
It's a little tiny web site, with one picture (and a note that he almost didn't want to show it because it would show his "secrets") and a few videos that are supposedly taken from this robot's head cameras.
Yea okay.
I think that if this were legit, there would be more then a little cheezy web page and no other documentation. If the guy really wanted to service the public with his "traffic" bot then he wouldn't be so secretive about it anyways..
It's quite probable that these render farms contain no local storage at all; they don't really need it. I guess it would depend on a lot of variables.
For IDE vs SCSI, it really depends. Some of the higher end IDE stuff has longer warranties and faster rotation speeds. They are meant for mid-market server type applications. Depending on the situation, IDE can certainly offer great advantages over SCSI in the terms of cost. There's some really nice IDE raid controllers, and with 300GB IDE disks you can slap together some really huge storage volumes. It might not be as high of performance as SCSI, but it can come close and it's 1/10th the price.
Your experience may vary, but for me, IDE disks appear to be manufactured with similar QC as SCSI disks. I haven't noticed any differences in failue rates, but you're certainly right in that most desktop-class IDE disks only come with a single year warranty these days, so this could become a factor when deciding on which technology to use.
I would imagine, however, any firm that goes and purchases boxes in the thousands would also purchase extended warranty agreements. It's a part of any mid to large data center cost. Usually, you go with one brand, and stick to it, and purchase blanket warranties every year based on approximately how many machines you got running.
I suppose any large scale system would have redundancy. If a handful of nodes drop out, the system should be able to cope with this seamlessly. Same would go for things like hard drives; I'd hope that if the data on the individual units' drives need to be preserved, RAIDs would come into play.
For sure though, you definately want to budget repairs. They play a fairly big part of any data center setting; if you got six thousand boxes it must be huge.
ps. I've never found SCSI disks to be any more reliable, unfortunately... just a hell of a lot more expensive, and a bit quicker. And of course, more versatile =)
Although I do not disagree with you; power concerns *could* be an advantage if you say, move from 6,000 servers to 4,000. It could help offset the cost of the hardware and personnel resources a bit.
You seemed to make it out to be the holy grail of using more powerful boxes. If you did not mean this, I apologize.
One comment however, about "not having to worry about parts that most often fail after a year" I'm assuming you mean PC vs. Mac? This is an unfair comparison, and most of the hardware in the two systems end up coming from the same plants anyways.
I'm sure Sega ordered 7.6Mhz chips, and got chips guarenteed to run at 7.6Mhz. If they are overclockable, that's great but if 1,000 of them are bad, Motorola won't do much to help you out. In fact, they'd probably sue you.
Insightful?
I seriously doubt that power consumption is in the minds of anyone over at Pixar. Compared to the costs of administration, personell, and the hardware itself, power isn't even close to the top of the list.
Pixar will use whatever systems they need to make production time resonable. If that means an extra few thousand bucks a month because of the extra 30 servers, who cares.. drop in the bucket.
There's other (more rational) reasons for reducing the number of servers, and the lower electric bill is simply a bonus.
Since when do Americans educate themselves about purchases ever? =)
I guess some people ask me what they should buy, and I usually just don't give a shit enough to try to get them to use something other then Windows. If I do, I'll become tech support for them and I already get enough of that junk from work.
This wasn't always something you could do.
There were certian softwares out that that helped circumvent floppy protection, like CloneCD does for CD's. But it didn't always work.
Back when I used my Commodore 64 full time, some of the disks themselves were physically altered (a hole in the disk here, a notch there, etc) so 100% duplication was often impossible.
Of course, the crackers were able to work around this stuff pretty easily.